


Those Black-Eyed Peas, They Tasted Alright to Me

by ladivvinatravestia



Series: Through This Dark Land [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, F/M, HYDRA Trash Party adjacent, Homophobic Slurs, Intimate Partner Violence, M/M, Object Insertion, Original Characters - Freeform, Other, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Verbal Abuse, gendered slurs, internalized victim-blaming, no beta we die like men, roaring rampage of revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 13:13:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21075452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladivvinatravestia/pseuds/ladivvinatravestia
Summary: Earl has to die.





	Those Black-Eyed Peas, They Tasted Alright to Me

**Author's Note:**

> Although I've marked this as a sequel to "The Last Known Survivor Stalks His Prey in the Night", it's very different in tone and is not cute or fluffy at all.
> 
> The original spooktober and whumptober prompts for the day were "scars", "spider", and "zombie apocalypse". October is also Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I was originally thinking about doing "zombie apocalypse" as some kind of elaborate metaphor for domestic violence, but then I just decided to go the non-metaphorical route.
> 
> I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts. Many quite terrible things happen to the characters in this fic. They are not all taken from the same true crime case, but they are all things that abusers have done to their victims in one or more cases I've listened to. The only assurance I can make you in this fic is that no children are subject to sexual abuse, and no animals are harmed on screen.
> 
> People of all genders can be abusers, and people of all genders can be victims. I know from experience that it can be difficult to realize that you are in an abusive relationship, and also scary and difficult to get out. Here are some resources you may find helpful:  
US: [National Domestic Violence Hotline](https://www.thehotline.org/help/)  
Canada: [Ending Violence Association of Canada](http://endingviolencecanada.org/getting-help/)

There aren't any HYDRA cells in this area; the Soldier just happens to be passing through on his way from Abilene to Superior. What there are in this area, though, are supercells that have the potential to get bad, fast. When he heard the warning on the radio, he was fifty miles from the nearest town, so the Soldier pulled his truck over to the side of the road near a run-down looking farmhouse and evacuated with Alpine to the farm's external storm cellar. No sense in taking undue operating risks, especially not now that he has a team to look after.

The cellar is poorly-stocked - old mummified vegetables and dusty stacks of canned goods that expired ten years ago - and the Soldier wonders what happened to the people who lived here. Alpine protests loudly from his personnel transport unit, so as soon as he's sure the cellar door is secure behind them, the Soldier lets Alpine loose to do recon. There's not much light down here, and even less cell service, but maybe he can catch up on some sleep. Outside, the wind begins to howl.

After about ten minutes, and just as the Soldier is praising Alpine for his first confirmed kill, a spider, the door to the storm cellar opens, letting in driving sheets of rain. With it come three little girls in sopping nightgowns, each smaller and bonier than the last. The largest of the three girls, who can't herself be more than nine or ten, clutches a baby bundled hastily in blankets. When the girls see the Soldier, their eyes widen in alarm but they stand otherwise motionless and mute.

"I'm not a hostile," says the Soldier, holding up his hands, empty but gloved.

Wordlessly, the children sit down against the wall opposite the Soldier, huddling for warmth. When she sits, the largest girl's nightgown rides up to just below her knees, revealing welts on her lower legs that the Soldier knows from personal experience come of being whipped with an electrical cord.

The Soldier has killed many people, injured many more. But all of that violence was done when he was clear-headed and calm, following orders. He cannot think of the last time he felt _angry_ enough to kill. What kind of monster mistreats a little girl so? Even the Red Room didn't use such barbaric techniques. He keeps silent, having an idea now of why the little girls don't want to speak.

Alpine, however, has no such compunctions, and he struts right up to the youngest girl, introducing himself and presenting his demands for scritches. The girl shrinks in to her sister's side, eyes wide.

"Alpine! Psst! Come here!" the Soldier says, leaning forward and stretching his right hand out towards Alpine. Alpine, insubordinate as ever, meows contemptuously at him and then sits down to begin grooming himself.

"You and your kitty have to get out of here, mister," says the oldest girl finally. The baby in her arms has ben awake this whole time but hasn't made a sound. "If daddy finds you out here he'll be really mad and then he'll hurt you and your cat too."

"Does your daddy get really mad a lot?" the Soldier asks, though he suspects he knows the answer.

The oldest girl clams up, but the middle one says, "He doesn't mean to get so mad, only sometimes we didn't do our chores the way he wanted us to, or mommy spent too much money on groceries again."

"Chloe!" hisses the oldest girl, and the middle one, Chloe, presumably, clams up and says nothing further.

The Soldier ponders taking the four children with him when he gets back on the road to Superior, but there's a mother stuck in this situation, too. He'll have to find a different extraction plan.

As the storm is letting up, a woman comes out to fetch the children from the storm cellar. She is just as thin as the children and, like them, she's barefoot in a thin nightgown. Her face and arms are a patchwork of bruises and she bears the same welts from having been whipped with the electrical cord. There's a burn from a cigarette butt just below her right eye and she's easily seven months pregnant.

"Daddy's sleeping right now," she tells them, "so if you come in really quiet maybe he won't wake up."

The Soldier lets himself fade into the shadows in the corner and if the woman sees him, she makes no acknowledgment at all. When she sees Alpine, she looks at him sadly.

"Go on, get out of here, kitty," she says. It doesn't look like she has the energy to make a shooing motion.

Alpine starts to express his opinion about her hospitality, or lack thereof, and she makes a sudden movement towards him as though to silence him. Alarmed, he darts off behind one of the stacks of cans and she shakes her head.

"Come on, girls," she says, and herds the children out of the cellar. They don't look back, or make any indication that they know the Soldier is still in there.

~~

In town, it's laughably easy to gather intel about the Lowry family. Erica, who is the third Mrs. Lowry, is a clerk at the gas station convenience store. She's quiet and doesn't socialize, spending time and money in town only long enough to buy groceries for her family and head back out to the farm. She met Cody on line or something, she doesn't have any family anywhere near here. The first Mrs. Lowry seemingly died after falling down a flight of stairs, and the second Mrs. Lowry put a bullet in her head. Nobody's sure how many little Lowrys there are; they are home-schooled. One of them might have turned eighteen and run away a while bak. At any rate, nobody's seen him in three or four years. Cody Lowry is a drunkard and a meth addict. He hasn't held a job in years.

Farmer Len, back in Racine, told the Soldier and Alpine not to get involved in "this whole costumed vigilante business". The Soldier figures that's the only business he's ever been involved in, as long as he can remember, at least, and it's pretty clear to him that someone needs to get involved here. He drives three hours and two towns away and spends an afternoon in Wal-Mart, putting together go-bags for Erica and the four children he saw, paying cash. Alpine is not happy at being left to stand guard over their truck, but brightens up when the Soldier lets him out to help inventory the go-bags.

Then it's back to the Lowry farm for surveillance. Once the Soldier has an idea of the family's routine, he'll know how and when to best extract mother and children from the op. Alpine is again left to guard the truck. He's unhappy about it, vocally so, but the Soldier explains that until he's mastered the art of stealth he's a liability on surveillance operations. Alpine attempts to prove his mastery of stealth by pouncing on the Soldier's feet as he's trying to sleep that night in the bed of the truck, but ruins the effect by explaining enthusiastically all about his methods when the Soldier is wakened by the attack.

The next day, the Soldier does recon on the property and finds that he can see into the house with the scope of his rifle by lying on the garage roof. The children huddle together in a sparsely-furnished room. They're not locked in, but they make no moves to leave the room. They are clearly not doing any school work. They don't seem to be engaging in any play, either, just sitting quietly like even the slightest movement or noise will bring their father's wrath down on them. Erica has gone off to work and Cody is lying on the couch drinking. He passes out mid-morning, then awakes, yelling his wife's name.

"God damnit, where are you, you fucking bitch," he slurs. "Good for nothing whore is never around when I need her."

He heaves himself off the couch and surveys the living room. Everything is neat and tidy, a contrast to his own appearance.

"She never does any work around here," he mutters to himself. "I'll make some fucking work for her."

And then he calmly bends and flips the coffee table over on its side, sending everything on it flying through the air. This seems to satisfy him, and he heads toward the kitchen, stopping to tip a potted plant over and grind the dirt into the carpet with his heel. Then he finds a liquor bottle, but when he picks it up to look at it, the expression on his face changes.

"Empty!" he spits, and dashes the bottle onto the floor, where it shatters. "Stupid cunt never buys enough food or booze," he says, and then he's attacking the contents of the house with unhinged fury instead of cool calculation. A kitchen window smashed. Contents of the fridge swept out onto the linoleum. A fist through the back rung of a chair. The Soldier feels himself tensing up. He had, more than once, to clean up a safe house that had been deliberately trashed by his handlers, even when he himself had performed admirably on the mission.

Could he go into the house the next time Cody is passed out, and start the cleanup himself? No, he thinks, drawing on his own previous experiences. It will be important to Cody that Erica do it, to remind her who controls her. Will one day of surveillance be sufficient? Can he get her and the kids out tonight? His previous observations of the children suggest they will not be willing to trust him with an extraction plan.

As he's thinking it through, Erica arrives home in her beat-up old station wagon. She takes several bags of groceries, more than it looks like she should be able to carry in one trip, and hurries into the house, head tucked down and shoulders drawn in. The minute that she gets through the door, and see the trashed house, she stills, and though her face is expressionless the Soldier knows exactly how she is feeling because he has been there so many times himself.

Cody rolls off the couch once more and stalks towards his wife, fists clenched. When he takes a swing at her, she doesn't flinch away or try to plead with him. She must already know from experience that it won't have any effect, or that it might make him even angrier. He shouts at her, calling her many of the insults he'd leveled at her before while he was trashing the house and a few new ones besides.

Earlier, the Soldier's plan had been to extract mother and children while Cody was asleep or unconscious, so he wouldn't have to be engaged at all. Now, though, he doesn't think he wants to wait that long. Cody grabs Erica by the hair at the nape of her neck and begins dragging her over to the upturned coffee table. She lets the bags of groceries slip bonelessly from her hands. He has moved on to calling her a "frigid bitch" and "so fucking tight I might as well be trying to fuck an air hose."

Then he's shoving her roughly over the edge of the table and flipping her skirt up and - _no_. The Soldier can't allow this to happen. Bad enough that it happened to him, even when he deserved it for looking so submissive and fuckable in his tac suit, but poor Erica isn't trying to tease or provoke anybody. She's just trying to care for her family.

When he'd come up here, the Soldier meant only to use the scope of his rifle, for surveillance. He hadn't anticipated shooting anyone. But that didn't mean he hadn't brough any kind of ammo with him. His hands barely shake as he loads his rifle, but when he sets the scope to his eye again, Cody is penetrating Erica with a length of PVC pipe. She's undoubtedly in a great deal of pain and shame, but Cody doesn't need to hold her down or restrain her. She just submits to it, as the Soldier had. He feels bile rise in his throat and knows his hands won't be steady enough to make the shot. Well. He can be pretty good at brute force, too.

He vaults down from the garage, stalks across the unmown grass to the house, pulls open the door so hard the house shakes, and continues walking at the same steady pace until he's close enough to Cody to grab him by the belt and shirt collar and toss him bodily aside.

Cody has the air briefly knocked out of him, but he comes up swinging soon enough. Erica stays still where she is.

"Who's this?" Cody demands, wiping blood away from the corner of his mouth with his hand. "Have you been cheating on me? I'm not man enough for you, huh? Can't believe you're still so tight after taking so much cock."

He swings a fist at the Soldier, who catches it easily in his left hand, holding him in place. Apparently he still feels he has the upper hand.

"Or maybe the bitch is so tight because you can't get it up for her," he tries, stepping into the Soldier's personal space. "You're a fucking faggot, aren't you?"

"What if I am?" asks the Soldier. It definitely wasn't the answer Cody was expecting, and he now looks considerably more scared than angry. 

"You better not fucking touch me," Cody says, trying to pull free of the Soldier's grasp.

"Why?" asks the Soldier, taking hold of Cody's other arm and backing him into the living room wall, getting even further into his space. "Because you wouldn't want me treating you the way you treat your own wife?"

He has no intention of following through on this threat, but Cody struggles, attempting to both headbutt him and knee him in the groin. He doesn't manage either, but the Soldier is distracted enough from the similarity of Cody's treatment of Erica to his own treatment by HYDRA that he's not in top fighting form. Cody manages to knock them both off-balance and they grapple on the floor, with Cody trying to slice at him with the neck of the bottle he broke earlier. Finally the Soldier gets Cody pinned and he sits on top of him, knee parked in the middle of his chest and an arm across his neck. Cody struggles.

The Soldier does not have a kill order on Cody. He is supposed to be taking out HYDRA agents, not civilians. Cody hasn't wronged him personally. He could sit up now, let Cody go. Keep him tied to a chair or something until he can extract Erica and the children. Cody's struggles weaken ever so slightly and his eyes are very wide. Erica is still bent over the upturned table, waiting for whatever is meted out to her. The Soldier presses harder against Cody's neck, until he goes limp, and then a little longer, for good measure. Finally he presses his right middle and index finger against Cody's jugular, testing for a pulse. There isn't one. He sits back, distancing himself a little from the body.

"Erica," he says carefully. "Ma'am." She doesn't move but he can see her eyes flicking in his direction. Trying to guess his intentions. "You can stand up, now, if you like. Go see your children if you want. You're not in any danger from me. I'm going to call the police now and report myself."

He doesn't wait to see what she's going to do. When he was first escaped from HYDRA, still learning how to - be - when his every move wasn't being controlled, he hadn't liked people watching him. He just wanted to be left in peace. So he turns his back, pulls out his cell phone, and dials emergency services.

The police arrive 45 minutes later. The Soldier recognizes one of the officers - they'd chatted in the pet store earlier this week when he was picking up kibble for Alpine and she was getting a new chew toy for her dog. She and her partner take a look around the wrecked living room, and then she takes Erica off to the kitchen to question her while her partner takes the Soldier's statement.

"I killed him, sir," the Soldier says. "I don't need to talk to a lawyer. I'll plead guilty. I just - I have my cat, out in my truck, I want to make sure he goes to a good home before I go away."

"Now hold on, son," says Officer Nelson. He's a kindly-looking man in his late 50s, which means that technically, the Soldier is old enough to be _his_ father. "Why don't you tell me how it all went down before you volunteer to go off to jail?"

So the Soldier gives him as detailed a debrief as he can, and by the time he's done, Officer Perez is coming out of the kitchen. Erica follows her, hugging her arms to her chest and looking down at the ground. Perez makes eye contact with Nelson and cocks her head, and they go back into the kitchen together. Erica looks everywhere but at the Soldier, and she still hasn't gone up to check on the children. The Soldier starts to wonder if he should make the check, but then the officers come out of the kitchen, and Officer Perez says,

"Erica, Jim, I think we can all agree that what happened here tonight was done in self-defence. Neither of you will be charged."

Erica slumps against the upturned table, gripping it hard. She makes no sound but the Soldier can see tears streaming silently down her cheeks. He knows it's too soon for her to be feeling any kind of relief, but he hopes that with time she'll start to feel more like a person again, the way he has.

"And Erica, I have some resources I'd like to recommend for you and the kids, to help with your recovery," Officer Perez continues.

Officer Nelson claps the Soldier on the shoulder - the left one, as it happens, and he snatches his hand back comically when he encounters something more solid than flesh there. "Jim, I understand you're just passing through," he says. "You did a good thing here tonight, but can I suggest that you keep on passing through before the rumor mill can start up?"

"Yes, sir," agrees the Soldier. He's worried about Erica and her children, but his staying here won't help them start to recover. In fact, it might even hurt them. It's why he hasn't sought out Captain America yet.

~~

Alpine is highly indignant to have been left guarding the truck for such a long time, almost twelve hours. He starts in on conversation before the Soldier can even get the back of the truck open, and he can't tell whether what Alpine is giving him is a mission report or an opinion on his qualities as a team leader. He sits down on the open tailgate and when Alpine deigns to emerge from the bedroll, the Soldier scoops him up and holds him carefully to his chest, burying his face in Alpine's fur. He's still talking, but his purr is as loud as a chainsaw and it's one of the most reassuring noises the Soldier knows.

"I know, buddy, I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't like to leave you for such a long time, but that was - a dangerous mission."

Alpine agrees, at length.

"No, I can't promise there won't be any more missions like that," says the Soldier. "We have to help people out, if we see them being hurt like that."

Alpine meows his approval. And then, the conversation seemingly over, he kneads his claws into the Soldier's thigh a couple of times before falling soundly asleep. The Soldier looks up. The sky is clear, and now that the thunderstorms have passed through, it's a pretty nice night. He reaches back, careful not to disturb Alpine's rest, and pulls on his bedroll until it's close enough for him to prop under his neck. They'll be moving on tomorrow morning, but for now they've earned a bit of sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Visit me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/ladivvinatravestia), where my asks box is always open to prompts.


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